Glean

What is Glean?

Glean is an intelligent search platform for companies that uses artificial intelligence to find any internal information, regardless of where it is stored. Slack, Google Drive, Notion, Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Salesforce — Glean connects all these sources and allows any employee to find what they need with a natural language search.

Founded in 2019 by former Google employees (including the co-founder of Google Drive), Glean addresses a real and costly problem in companies: time lost searching for information across dozens of different tools.

How it works

Glean continuously indexes and synchronizes content from all connected company tools, respecting the original access permissions of each system. When you ask a question, the AI:

1. Searches indexed documents and messages
2. Understands the context of your work (who you collaborate with, on which projects)
3. Ranks relevant results specifically for you
4. Synthesizes an answer with references to the original sources

The key differentiator is that Glean understands permissions: you only see what you would normally have access to.

Key features

• Unified Search: One place to find information across all tools.
• AI Answers (Glean Assistant): Synthesized answers with cited sources.
• Personal Context: Results ranked based on your profile and projects.
• Glean for Slack: Search and ask questions directly within Slack.
• Knowledge Graph: Understands relationships between people, projects, and documents.
• Governance and Permissions: Inherits original permissions from each connected system.
• Analytics: Visibility into knowledge gaps and search patterns in the company.

Available integrations

Glean connects with more than 100 corporate apps, including:

• Communication: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, Outlook
• Documents: Google Drive, SharePoint, OneDrive, Notion, Confluence
• Projects: Jira, Asana, Linear, Monday.com
• Code: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket
• CRM & Sales: Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk
• HR: Workday, BambooHR
• Analytics: Looker, Tableau, Snowflake

Who it is for

• Growing companies where knowledge is dispersed across multiple tools.
• New employees who need to find information quickly during onboarding.
• Engineering teams looking for documentation, technical decisions, and code.
• Customer Success and Support needing fast answers to assist customers.
• Operations and Strategy needing to cross-reference information from various sources.

Real use cases

1. Accelerated Onboarding: New hires find processes, policies, and contacts without having to ask anyone.
2. Meeting Preparation: "What was decided about project X in recent weeks?"
3. Customer Support: Agents find answers in knowledge base + history of previous tickets.
4. Technical Reviews: Engineers find ADRs, PRs, and related discussions before making decisions.
5. Sales Enablement: Salespeople find cases, decks, and relevant battlecards for each negotiation.

The problem Glean solves

Market studies indicate that knowledge workers spend an average of 9.3 hours per week searching for information. In a 500-person company with an average salary of $80k/year, this represents more than $9 million lost annually in unproductive search time.

Pricing

Glean operates on a custom enterprise pricing model. Factors influencing price:

• Number of active users
• Volume of indexed content
• Number of contracted integrations
• Security and compliance requirements (deployment in dedicated cloud)

Public estimates suggest values starting at $30 to $50/user/month for larger contracts.

Pros and cons

Pros:

• Solves a real and painful problem in companies with many tools.
• Respects original permissions automatically (no information leaks).
• Learns each user's work context over time.
• Significant reduction of "where is this information?".
• Integration with Slack for use in the existing workflow.

Cons:

• High price for small businesses.
• Requires a minimum volume of content for the search to be truly useful.
• Initial setup and maintenance of integrations demands IT time.
• Search quality depends on content being organized in the source tools.

Alternatives to Glean

Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 (for those in the Microsoft ecosystem), Guru, Notion AI, Confluence Search, and Elastic Search are alternatives with different depths of integration and pricing models.